


Stitch by Stitch

by Charmtion



Series: We are Wolves [10]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon Universe, F/M, Healing, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, S8/Post-ADWD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-23 00:25:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18538537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charmtion/pseuds/Charmtion
Summary: “Jon.”Sansa takes the steps two at a time, chasing the echo of her shout as it drifts amongst the snowflakes. She is a deer on ice — a tangle of limbs, flailing feet, wide eyes, chattering teeth — as she falls into his arms. Half a hundred fears spring from her heart to her tongue. Like a waterfall, the words tumble out. Jon says nothing, only turns his face into the crook of her neck, swallows the scent that lingers on her skin, shudders in the shelter of her arms.Winds blow, wraiths walk, wolves endure//Jon and Sansa survive the battle at winter's heart — and try to build a life together amidst the ashes of its aftermath.





	Stitch by Stitch

Sansa stands on the battlements, silent as the snow catching on the stone beneath her fingers. White-knuckled, the grip she keeps as she watches them return: scores of them, bloodied and cleaved, ragged as the furs slung about their shoulders. Some limp whilst others stagger; they move as wraiths made flesh — but they are warm.

 _Warm_.

Sansa sees to that, slipping graceful as a raven from her perch on the battlements to lead weary warriors into the hall. Like wraiths to a tomb, they follow the sweep of her skirts. Black as death, the gown she wears; but her eyes are sunlit sea, her hair red and rich as the fire she sees them sit beside.

Bowls of soup, heels of rough-hewn bread; they sip and nip numbly, eyes great spark-filled pools drinking in the flames.

 _Warm_.

Outside, the snow is still falling. Thick and quick as autumn rains, it settles as drifts of ash upon her shoulders, feathers her cheeks like kisses from icy lips. Beneath the mantle of the clouds, the sky is darkening. Sansa looks for stars in the spread of ink as she walks the battlements, eyes upturned, fingers trailing snow-swept stone. Torches light her way; the stars stay hidden — save for a speck of flame far off between the sloping hills.

Half the night, she watches as speck turns to spot to sphere to star. Her breath rests heavy in her throat now as she glimpses the face limned by its light: grim and grey-eyed, a shadow pacing at his side white as the snow settling as a crown upon his dark head.

“ _Jon_.”

Sansa takes the steps two at a time, chasing the echo of her shout as it drifts amongst the snowflakes. She is a deer on ice — a tangle of limbs, flailing feet, wide eyes, chattering teeth — as she falls into his arms. Half a hundred fears spring from her heart to her tongue. Like a waterfall, the words tumble out. Jon says nothing, only turns his face into the crook of her neck, swallows the scent that lingers on her skin, shudders in the shelter of her arms.

 

*

 

Later, she finds him in the lord’s chair, sitting court over a hall empty of men and merriment. His fingers curl as claws on the ironwood arms. Gently — one by one — she prises them free of the chair’s grip, wraps his hand in her own and leads him from the hall and all its shadows. He leans on her a little as they make their way through the grey galleys, mount the stone-cut steps, settle at the darkwood hearth of her chamber.

Sansa vanishes and appears again in half a breath, an ewer in her hands, a smile gentling her lips. Jon stares at the flames as she sinks to her knees on the flagstones, sets the ewer upon a scattered bearskin, wets a cloth in the lukewarm water.

“Of blood and battle, I will never ask.” Her voice is a lullaby, warm as the woodsmoke curling off the fire. “But of your heart, I have no need to ask. I feel its weariness, its weight, its worry beat within my own.”

She trails fingertips light as feathers across his cheek; numbly, he takes in her eyes as a breath, greedy, gulping — a drowning man breaking through the surface of a lake. A frown steeples to her brow as his lip trembles.

“I will mend this broken heart of yours, Jon Snow,” she says softly. “Stitch by stitch, seam by seam — one day it will flow full as sails on the wind.”

He looks at her, solemn as the men of stone that haunt the castle crypts; but she sees the spark of starlight in his eyes. _Warm_ — _I will make him so again_. Silently, she takes his hands, washes the blood from them. They watch the water turn crimson as the flames glowing in the darkwood hearth. He flexes his fingers — clean and pale and bloodless — between her own. Then he rests his brow to hers, breathes her breath.

Sansa lifts her face to him, tastes the salt of his tears when he kisses her.

 

*

 

Outside, the snow keeps falling. Beneath its ash-drifts, they count their losses — and begin to learn their blessings. Dead men, burnt beasts, everywhere missing faces, absent laughter, voices lost to the tragic threads of time. But there, a plump-cheeked child gnawing at bread beside a brazier. And there, a handful of horses held by a grey-garbed northman; glossy coats catching at the drifts of sunlight filtering through a thousand flecks of snow.

 _His_ horse, shimmering as dragonglass in that weak white light. Jon runs his hand down the stallion’s neck, remembers it as it was during the battle at winter’s heart: sweat-slicked, blood-flecked, a swirl of black and crimson as the wings that beat at the skies overhead. Clean, now — and _warm_.

He pulls away his hand, stares down at his fingers free of the blood that once coated the stallion’s neck. A furrow between his eyes, he waits for the crimson to creep back upon his skin as it does most every night in his dreams.

A hand on his arm. He turns to see her: eyes blue as sunlit sea, hair a streak of fire over her shoulder. Gently, she takes his hand, laces her fingers between his own.

 

*

 

Sansa keeps her promise; she does not ask after blood and battle, not now, not ever. In truth, there is no need to. She sees the ghosts and griefs it conjures writ sharp as ice across his face. His body is a hard-packed map of muscle and scar, skin marked by blade and bodkin and burn and bruise — but none pain him so much as the sting of memory. Primed as a dagger-point and twice as sharp, it dogs him from dawn to dusk.

By day, he keeps the pain buried deep as spring bulbs in damp soil, treads it down with each step and sigh of a lord’s duty.

By dark, it haunts him.

Sometimes he thrashes in his sleep, wild as a netted fish. Other times he screams open-mouthed into his pillow, fingers clenched to fists, arms flailing as he fights some unseen enemy. Always he wakes — gulping, gasping, grappling — with wide eyes and wet cheeks.

Sansa keeps her promise even then, her arms opening as he slumps across the bed to her embrace. Keeps it even as he buries his face into her belly, shoulders shaking as she smooths her fingers over his sweat-damp skin. Keeps it still as he shivers silently, his arms gripping tight as a stone snake around her waist, his eyes wild as the flames dancing raggedly in the darkwood hearth.

She does not ask; she sings instead. Soft songs, the same lullabies and cradle-charms crooned a thousand times over to comfort all the weary hearts made heavy by the troubles of the world. Word by word, Sansa lifts the weight of trouble from the man she cradles in her arms gentle as a fledgling in a soft-cupped palm.

 

*

 

Jon hefts those songs as a shield when Sansa is not there to soothe the sting of grief and memory. He wants her at his side, _needs_ her there always; but she is queen of their little hive, busier than each and every bee that buzzes at its core. Whilst he sits court from the lord’s chair, she flits from hearth to hall to storeroom to stable, pen between her teeth, Sam a shadow at her side as he copies down all that she counts and commands.

Beneath her careful eye, walls are patched, towers repaired, granaries rationed, hands kept busy. She sets a craftsman to melding the shattered shards of the glass gardens, asks Gendry to oversee the leading of its panes. In a moon’s turn, it is rebuilt; half a moon after that, the first seeds are sown in its hot heavy soil. Beds of beet and barley, green-topped carrots, a flush crop of onions. Jon watches as Sansa swoops to pluck one from the damp earth, hefts it in the air to show him. His fingers close on the polished globe; she tumbles toward him, tips her chin up to meet his kiss.

“A fine crop,” he breathes against her lips. “Where did you find the seeds?”

“A smuggler gave them to me,” she whispers. “He holds the bulbs that make his sigil in high regard… went all the way to the Reach to bring back some onions for his lady.”

Light as a feather, the kiss she presses to his lips before she spins away from him to carry on her counting of every seed and stone that makes up the castle they call home.

Jon slips back into the lord’s chair, a smile knocking aside his usual frown to think of his blunt-fingered steward proffering a gift of onion bulbs to Sansa, all bowed head and blushing cheeks. At his side, Davos steals a shadow of that frown, no doubt wondering at why his lord is now biting back a grin.

 

*

 

Half a year after the warriors came home from the war, they gather again in Winterfell’s godswood. The world is still white; snow dusts bare black ironwood boughs, settles on the silvery branches of the weirwood tree. Beneath its red-gold leaves, Arya lifts to her tiptoes, presses a kiss to Gendry’s grinning mouth as Jon intones the words that see them bound as one before the old gods of tree and leaf and rock and pool.

Sansa turns her cheek to the fur-trimmed collar of her cloak; its brush of warmth flushes with the memory of her own wedding amongst the heart tree’s crooked roots. _My only wedding_. The others — lion’s bride, piece of skin beneath a flayman’s knife — are as burned paper, charred fragments vanishing beneath the press of snowflakes on the air. _Only one, only him_. Jon meets her gaze, sure and steadfast as the day they joined hands beneath the red-gold leaves and whispered the words that made them husband and wife.

“When will you tell him?”

Even in a gown of wedding white, Arya slips silent as a shadow to Sansa’s side. Her dark hair has long since grown out as a tumble to her waist, curls soft as the smile that warms her wide grey eyes.

Sansa straightens the crown of winter roses that sits her sister’s brow. “Once you are wedded _and_ bedded, little sister.” She gives a smile of her own to see Arya’s deepen. “You make a beautiful bride… Mother would’ve wept to see it.”

“More like died again of shock to see me in a dress.” Arya pulls a face and then joins with Sansa’s laughter, their hands clasped tight between them. “Our pack survived, just like Father said it would… I cannot wait for a pup to join it, Sansa, truly.”

 

*

 

Echoes of the wedding feast drift with the snowflakes to settle in the godswood. Sansa slips between the moss-stoned walls, threads a trail through the bare black trees and finds Jon still stood beneath the bone-white branches of the heart tree. He is gazing intently at the deep black pool at the weirwood’s foot, his eyes flickering to follow the red leaves drifting as embers across the glossy water.

“I remember coming here after Sam told me the truth of my mother,” he says, his voice so swift and soft she strains to hear it. “Half-dragon, that scrap of parchment he found made me… yet when I stood here looking at the pool, thinking of all the prayers I’d made to the old gods over the years… I never felt more of a wolf than I did in that moment, Sansa.”

“You are a wolf,” she says softly. “You’re _my_ wolf.”

Jon holds out a hand; Sansa takes it, gives a sigh as he pulls her flush against him. His fingers smooth ruby strands of hair back from her brow, a ghost of breath as he kisses her there. She dips her face to the crook of his neck; he rests his chin to the top of her head as his arms tighten around her.

“Everywhere I look there are ghosts… seems to me each face and flower gives a glimpse of those we have lost.” His voice rattles in his throat; her ribs creak as he grips her tighter. “Even as we stand here alone beneath the heart tree, I see Bran beside us, his face bone-white as its bark.”

“I see him, too,” she whispers. “Death is all around us, Jon, for true… but so is life.” She takes his hand, lays it to her belly. “Here, feel it.”

Wordless and wide-eyed, the look he gives her — but warm. _Warm_. His fingertips cup the curve of her belly gently; she tastes the sweetness of his smile when he kisses her. Their laughter rings out — a softer song to the sounds of the wedding feast — as he spins her round and round, her hair flying out behind her, red as the leaves drifting their ember-trails across the deep black pool.

 

*

 

As her belly grows, Sansa lets her gowns hang looser. Every evenfall, Jon sits beside her at the hearth, watching as she unpicks wools and furs and velvets, threads her needle, hums a lullaby beneath her breath as she sews and weaves anew.

Fireflame plays with the shadows it casts across her face; Jon watches them flit as feathers her eagle-gliding cheekbones, her smooth chin, her brow half-quirked in concentration, her down-swept lashes as she stabs and sinks and pulls the little silver needle through bolts of cloth in that swift, sure way she does most anything.

Stitch by stitch, seam by seam — the pieces of his heart pull back together till it flows full as sails on the wind. Half a hundred memories spring from his heart to his tongue, then. Like a waterfall, the words tumble out. Sansa says nothing, only sets down her sewing, turns eyes of sunlit sea to drink his rain-grey gaze, listens as he recounts of that which she has never asked: blood and battle, the darkness he saw at winter’s heart — and all the griefs and ghosts that followed its ink-dark spread across the northern hills.

Like wraiths to a tomb, the dark threatens to crowd him. He feels it freeze as frost to stone the ragged stitches holding up his heart. A blink — rasp of lashes against his cheeks — and it blooms before him as wine spilt across a tabletop: ice-blue eyes, blackened hands, guttural shouts, screams of the dying, a dragon roaring overhead, a sky rent blue-black by ice and fire, blade and bow a deadly song ringing across the night. _Notch, aim, loose_ —

“Jon,” she says softly. “My love, look at me.”

A pulse-point pressing through her skin to kick at him; Jon opens his eyes to find his palm resting on her belly. _Warm_. Sansa glides her thumb the length of his cheekbone, smiles as he sinks to his knees before her. He lifts his palm from her belly, lays his lips to it instead. _Warm_. Memories of ice flood from him in an instant, like rain hard-won from the storm-clouds that carry it.

“Eddard,” he whispers against the hard curve of her belly. “He will be a little Ned.”

 

*

 

Dusk falls as a smoky shadow across the hills; but the heart of the north stays burning bright. Fireflame and feast stretches into the night, a long sweet song echoing from the rafters of the great hall to cast its feathers far as the raven flies.

Sansa sits the rosewood chair her mother had carved half a lifetime ago, thinks of sapphire eyes and red-rich hair as Winterfell rejoices for its heir sleeping snug inside her belly. Her fingertips tap the hard, round curve of it; the softest smile settles on her lips as she sees Jon halfway between the benches, ale-cup in his hand, a rare grin dappling his face fierce as the firelight. _Warm_. Sansa has seen to that, for him, for all of them scattered in the fire-blush of the hall.

There they sit, safe and soft in the glow of the torches: Sam tucking a sprig of lavender behind Gilly’s ear, Arya scowling at Gendry then breaking to reluctant laughter as he rubs a thumb across her nose, Brienne smiling at her ale-cup amidst a ragged clutch of wildlings, Davos turning his back to the hearth to clap a hand to Jon’s shoulder, Ghost a drift of snow curled at his feet. Sansa watches them from her rosewood chair, sees them spin bright as stars despite the darkness that sought to drown them.

In years to come, the singers will give it half a hundred names, that darkness: the Long Night, the Battle for the Dawn, the Last Dance of the Dragons, the Song of Ice and Fire. To pipe and flute and drum, they will set their bloody tale — all woodwind shrill and steady beat of stick to skin — till it wraps as woodsmoke round the rafters of every hearth and hall in the Seven Kingdoms.

Sansa shivers at the thought; no bard will sing _that_ tale so long as she sits the rosewood chair her mother sat before her. She will keep her promise and never speak of the blood and battle that formed winter’s beating heart that dark night. In truth, there is no need to. She sees what matters most scattered as stars before her now, not the dead — the _living_.

Of them, she will remember. Of them, she will sing — till their tale becomes just another fireside story, a moon-high lullaby to soothe a child to slumber.

 

*

 

Jon murmurs a different sort of tale when full-dark turns them both to bed, his lips whispering against the bare skin of her belly. Sansa leans back against the banked pillows, gazes down at him with half-closed eyes as he tells one of Old Nan’s gentler stories: piskies in the glen, their villages the size and shape of mushrooms sprouting in the wolfswood, their wings glittering like stardust in the night. He hums it all against the hard, round curve shining moon-pale in the candlelight; then looks up with wide eyes and a wider grin when their babe answers his words with a mighty kick.

Sansa reaches for him, then; dark as honey, the way his skin glides against her own. Sweet as honey, too, the soft little moan he gives when he kisses her. Hair a streak of fire across the pillows as she tips back her head, shudders a smile to feel his lips linger at her throat. Brow to brow, they move together: life and love a flood of warmth — blood, bone, blossoming belly — beating between them.

Afterward, they curl together as wolves sheltering from the snow without: a tangle of limbs, soft breath, sleep-heavy eyes. Sansa tucks her face into the crook of his neck, lets the thrum of his pulse-point sing her to sleep. His fingers in her hair, smoothing ruby strands the length of her back, down, down, _down_ —

“Thank you.”

A whisper, but still it wakes her. “For what?”

“For mending me,” he says softly. “Stitch by stitch, seam by seam… I’d be a husk of a man if not for you, my love.”

Sansa smiles against his neck, gives a soft little sigh as his arms tighten around her. “Death is all around us, Jon, for true… but _between_ us there is only life – and love.” She draws back, peeks up to find him gazing intently down at her. “Enough love to spark a flint to flame… and burn away all the ghosts that haunt your dreams, my love.”

Jon says nothing, only smiles down at her, runs a thumb across the hard curve of her belly, leaves a kiss that lingers on her lips long after the candle is blown out. Sansa savours its sweetness — woodsmoke, wildflowers, winter roses blooming in the glass gardens. _Warm_. His heartbeat a lullaby beneath her cheek, she sleeps sound as he.

Outside, the snow is still falling; but within the fire-blush of their chamber, their dreams are only of spring.

 

* * *

**Author's Note:**

>  **NB** : this was _supposed_ to be a shortish one-shot to complete my little Jonsa series... somehow it spiralled to 3000+ words. I loved writing each and every word, however, and am toying with the idea of an epilogue-type chapter to tie up any and all threads left by this piece, we shall see... For now, I dearly hope you enjoyed reading my rambling take on battle's aftermath; please feel free to leave feedback — I adore your thoughts, and will **always** reply! 🐺❤️


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